The APT Awards for Excellence in Dialectical Behaviour Therapy.

These annual awards were established to keep people 'enthused' and thinking about how they can apply DBT in their practice. Application is simple: just 1,000 words and the preparedness to discuss what you have written.

You can apply personally, or on behalf of your service and each successful submission will be published on our website. The benefit of receiving such an award is primarily in satisfaction and status. The tangible benefit is in the form of a certificate, which states your receipt of the award. You will also be able to put the words “Recipient of APT's Excellence in DBT Award 2018” on your letters / emails, if you wish.

What the award looks for is: (A) a description of an intervention with a patient or group of patients, (B) the intervention will feature DBT largely, although not necessarily being the only intervention you make with this patient / patient-group, (C) what you describe should “inspire” other people who read it – they should have ideas they want to implement in their practice too.

The awards are made annually, and the closing date for submissions is the last day of July. You can make submissions at any time during the year, and they will be retained and examined shortly after the closing date.

Recipients of the APT Awards for Excellence in DBT 2017:

Judge’s general remarks: There were four submissions which earned an award. There is no feedback given to individual unsuccessful submissions, but in general terms to be successful the submission has to be about a specific piece of work and contain sufficient detail to make it significant in some way. Also, as above, it needs to make the reader feel that they too might like to do what is described. The four successful submissions certainly fulfilled those criteria.

The DBT Programme
(Cygnet Hospital Bierley).

Judge’s comments: By breaking down DBT into five of its key functions and then describing how you tackled each of the five functions and the challenges you faced, this paper makes the reader feel that anybody could do it! It is great that numbers are attached which indicate the degree of success you had in achieving each of the functions, and the challenges make interesting reading too.

Judge’s comments: We felt this was a very good submission indeed: short, clear, and with lots of nice observations and touches. It describes the implementation of DBT in a low and medium secure setting, the challenges that occur in such a setting, and how they were overcome. It is strikingly short on quantitative data, but its virtues more than make up for that.

The DBT Service
(Broadmoor Hospital, West London Mental Health NHS Trust, London).

Judge’s comments: This is such a good piece of work that it doesn’t really fulfil the key criterion of inspiring the reader - simply because it is so impressive that it might discourage many people! Nevertheless, the work it describes is so appealing that we are delighted for it to receive an award; it makes great reading.

Judge’s comments: Without the video, this submission would not be worthy of an award; although it’s a good piece of work it may not inspire people to copy it. However, the video makes a world of difference: the former patient is so articulate about what makes a good and a bad group, and everything he got out of it, that it fulfils the key criterion of inspiring others to see if they could achieve this.